Plan a Release Roadmap for an Enablement Site

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Explain how releases work.
  
• Describe the pitfalls of managing multiple unpublished releases.
  

Peek Behind the Curtain of a Release

Now that we’ve had a chance to see how a release manager creates a release and adds items, let’s see how companies can manage multiple releases as they roll out their enablement strategy. 

Pure Aloe typically plans one release every quarter, but they can publish however frequently or infrequently they want. Marisol, the Pure Aloe release manager, can even prepare multiple releases simultaneously, across multiple content collections or within the same content collection. But there are a few important details that can affect how Marisol and her team publish all their planned releases.

When you use Trailmaker Release to create a release in a content collection, Trailmaker works behind the scenes to make a copy of all the content that’s currently published for that content collection. Let's look at how this process works so that you can troubleshoot some of the errors or warnings that can appear when you try to publish a release. 

First, you have your published content (1) that’s already live on your enablement site for learners to access. When you create a release (2), Trailmaker creates a copy of the currently published content collection (3). There’s no UI for this copy, but it’s hanging out in the background, ready to receive your updates.

When you publish the release (4), Trailmaker processes the release’s manifest items and updates the copy by adding content, updating existing content, archiving content, or restoring content, depending on the operations you selected for those items. The copy becomes the new version of the published content (5), overwriting all the content that was previously published for the content collection.

Anticipate How Releases Affect Your Enablement Site

Let’s look at a few examples to see how the published content on your enablement site is affected by changes in a release.

What’s Changing

Cindy, a content creator at Pure Aloe, has finished updating two trails that Marisol plans to include in her next release. In one trail, Cindy is adding a module. In the other trail, Cindy is removing a module from the trail, which still keeps the module available as stand-alone content outside of the trail. 

How the Changes Happen

When Marisol creates the release, she adds Cindy’s changes as items to the release.

At this point, Marisol has added three manifest items to the release. Before she can publish the release, she still needs to make sure that each item’s backpack is also added to the release. Marisol returns to Trailmaker Content, imports the backpacks for each item into her workspace, and adds each time to the release.

What the Published Changes Look Like

When Marisol publishes the release, Trailmaker Release processes the new and changed items from the release list. The new content is published and overwrites the previous content. 

Maintain Multiple Unpublished Releases

Marisol usually waits until she publishes her current release before she creates another release in the same content collection. Creating one release at a time ensures that each release contains all of the most recent changes published for that content collection. Marisol can still have multiple unpublished releases in the same collection, but she prefers not to, and here’s why. 

Let’s say that Marisol creates a release early in January, and publishes the release at the end of the month. Shortly afterward, she creates another release in February. When she creates the February release, Trailmaker Release prepares a copy of all the content that was published with the January release. So far, so good.

Then, Cindy discovers some errors in the January modules, and she wants to correct them before the February release is published. Marisol creates an Intermediate Bug Fixes release to help Cindy quickly resolve the errors. Cindy is relieved to get the issues fixed immediately. But, after the Intermediate Bug Fix release is published, the list of releases looks a little more complicated.

When Marisol tries to publish her February release, Trailmaker Release checks the timestamp for when the release was created, and reports an error. The February release was created earlier (February 7) than the Intermediate Bug Fixes release (February 14), and the Intermediate Bug Fixes release was published (February 21) before the February release. Trailmaker prevents Marisol from publishing the February release, which doesn’t include the bug fixes and would have overwritten changes published with the Intermediate Bug Fixes release. 

Although Trailmaker Release prevents the accidental overwrite from occurring, Marisol decides to keep things simple going forward, and only manage one unpublished release per content collection at a time.

Resources

• Trailhead: Trailmaker Content Basics
• Salesforce Help: Manage Releases with the Trailmaker Release App 
• Salesforce Help: Considerations for Managing Releases